It didn't work. I filled the white mask with black, turned off the layers and I get the shadow layer below. This is making me nuts

Molly,

Not the mask, the 'blur' and 'text' layers below the 'Ballons' layer. (BTW, I'm sure that when you said fill the mask with black, you meant only fill the selection on the mask with black).

You are doing it exactly right, as far as I can see. Good luck!

Cool, Geeze, I would be still doing this a week from now. Thank you BTW, You are allowed to post images now that you have your five posts.

Do you apply the Gaussian blur to the mask or the red layer? I tried it on both but the blue part didn't blur, just the red.

not exactly an easy tutorial

some interesting techniques !
i had to improvise on some steps, blurred the second highlight to get a better result

and im wondering if the highlights could be made in a better way, as they are a bit too random for my taste

heres my result

you dont want to make it blue, molly, you want it to be transparent

alpha select your path
shrink
activate Balloon layer
add layermask 'From Selection' and 'Invert'


and then you blur the layermask

The Gaussian blur is on the layer mask, to give the 'clear' look to the balloons.

I'm uploading the one I did. There is nothing original about it...just my attempt to follow this excellent tutorial.

you have the same problem as me, Jas45:

the N is not readable anymore (looks like a floating pillow ), same as my H

choosing the right font is essential for this tut....

Esper,

That's an interesting point. After your post, I went back to the 'text' layer and tried to reshape the 'N' (and 'S') with the eraser tool. But the hollow area in the top of the 'N' is only 13px wide in it's original form, and in the text we grow the selection by 20px. Needless to say, I still had the problem no matter how much I thinned the letter... we would need >40px of space to give the 'N' any definition.

Do you know of a workaround?

no i dont know of a workaround

i didnt grow my selection by 20px - i used less, but i used a different font

tutorials work the way they are shown, if you choose different values, fonts, colors, words, etc
they may work, but you can never be sure
i guess thats the point where the art begins:
improvising and making it right

i dont think you have to necessarily grow the selection, if you already have a real bubbly font

Esper,
Here is one possibility for the 'N'. It is not intended to be a "thing of beauty", just proof of concept.

The only thing I did was to use the free select tool to subtract from the selection after it was grown by 20px. Yes, I did a poor job with the lasso tool, and ommited some smoothing and the 2nd reflection layer, but it is an approach to defining the 'N' better if need be.

jas45: nice work on your balloon text! of course you can always tweak your letters to your liking - i usually make a path from the letter and change the path, i find that a little easier than using the free select tool.

Woah...very nice results! The pink is great, AnMal!
@all: like esper says, the font is importend. You can other fonts, but shrink/grow is not the same.
I use red cause the reflections are better on darker colors. If you use yellow the reflections opacity is different.
Molly: I try your xcf-file. It is all right on this. You must fill the shrinked selection with black on the layermask.
Then unselect it and use gaussian blur. Thats it.
Of course, you must turn off the blur layer!

On the screenshot i make a copy of the balloon layer so you can see the steps, i hope.

Hi, Chris not easy . Also Gimp crashing a few times made it interesting. For some reason , I could not get meaningful results with the alpha to color (black). I tried with black and gray (as the color to alpha) and adjusting the alpha layer curve but it did not give good results so I fudged the effect with add layer mode and a 5px gaussian blur on the reflection layers. Anyway here is my result. Thank you for going to the effort of making this tutorial. I enjoyed the challenge. Font is "babycakes" which I stretched with filters/text/freetype. I hoped that it may have given a bit more definition on the N and S but there is not much difference from your "cookies" font. Total time about 5 hours.

very good wooble.

nice molly, i think you should turn down the opacity of the highlights

the idea with the gradient on the strings is a good one !

i have never seen balloons that are transparent in the middle, thats why i added a semi transparent layer behind my balloons

I agree with esper...real balloons are not transparent.
If you want more opacity in the middle you can simply change the layermask.
My screenshot shows the mask is much brighter.

An other color variation with a layer filled with smooth plasma.

Chris F: I love the plasma balloons! looks better with more opacity too.

I agree, they do look better.